TE23 Double Feature

Anke Laufer

“The Silver Moth”

a long kiss. You will say: well, so what? It was nothing but a kiss, no more, no less. And I will reply: except, sometimes a kiss like that means nothing and sometimes it means everything, and both are possible interpretations. Because after that kiss she opened the door and ran off, into the rain. Not quite every night, but almost, those minutes are replayed in my dreams, a scene from a film on an endless loop: me, running across the murky carpark, blinded by the rain, sidestepping, looking for her, the sound of water pelting down on the car roofs overwhelming, deafening. Then I sense rather than see and hear this one car: the slam of the door, the ignition, the engine whining as it reverses out of the space, tyres sizzling on the flooded tarmac. When I finally found my way back to the van and flopped down behind the steering wheel, I saw that she had left me something, after all. The thermos flask topped with a silver beaker was lying on the passenger seat. I unscrewed the lid and sniffed at it. It smelled of coffee, with a slight hint of peppermint. At least, 186

I wanted it to. Back at the campsite, melancholy descended on me. It was there when I fried my eggs and perched on the steps to eat them. It was there when I washed my hair or worked on a few lines that might one day become a poem. It took almost three months for the longing to subside. The longing smelled of peppermint and coffee and popped up inside me like one of those windows on a computer screen that refuses to disappear, no matter where you click. And because I couldn’t just click the longing away, I had a thought. It was a mad idea, of course; a bet on the most unlikely thing in the world. And so, on the anniversary of our meeting, I was standing by my van at the services again. It was raining, but not like it had been that night. It was a kind of listless rain, occasional drops smacking onto the dusty windscreen. I implored the sky to make more of an effort. Then I did the desperate thing: I went over to the service station and got myself a coffee in a paper cup. 187